


The Library is Open

by trimalchio



Category: Football RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Mystery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2014-07-10
Packaged: 2018-01-26 21:23:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1703018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trimalchio/pseuds/trimalchio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Andrea Pirlo is a librarian, who's on the trail of a stolen book.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for a prompt to write a similar fic to my Karim Benzema is a PI fic.

I woke up with a sensitive scalp and a churning stomach. I was completely naked, except for my socks, but that didn't really give me much surprise. I stumbled into my bathroom, to throw up, to lessen my hangover. I was careful to make sure I didn't get any vomit in my beard.

I was running late for my bus, so I took the quickest possible shower and sprinted to the elevator, as its doors closed. My neighbor, Gigi Buffon, smirked at me, having held the doors open for me, and started whistling “Party in the USA” by Miley Cyrus. We both worked at Columbia University, so we usually took the Subway together, but today, I thought I was going to miss him.

“Aren't you going to apologize?”

“For what?”

“I could hear your drunk karaoke through the floor. You should really find more age-appropriate songs.”

“If you could hear it, why didn't come downstairs and join me?”

“I don't like to enable.”

“You mean, you don't like your pictures showing up on Facebook,” I replied.

Gigi shrugged, as though he had no clue what I was talking about, even though he knew he was a dirty slut when he drank three bottles of wine and wasn't particularly responsible in front of a cell phone camera.

Gigi was a Classics professor, while I was the head acquisitions librarian. That mostly meant that Gigi wrote angry journal articles about the sad state of Marxist philosophy while interpreting Ancient Roman history, while I schedule years of weeding projects and field hate mail from angry professors who didn't realize that we couldn't physically maintain all of the books mankind created within our walls. I didn't understand what he did and he didn't really get why I had to do any of my stuff either.

“No one takes the Marxists seriously, but it's still a pathetically popular viewpoint in academics,” Gigi would tell me every single time he was drunk. He would say these things early on in the night, before he got smashed and joined me on my karaoke machine. His favorite song to sing was “I Got You, Babe” by Sonny and Cher.

“What was the occasion for your solo celebration last night?”

“I finished my weeding project of medical. I didn't have enough notice to send out my invites.”

“I'm sorry I forgot to congratulate on the destruction of modern society,” Gigi was one of those professors who had a lot of opinions of weeding projects, since he assumed that the librarians just held massive book burnings after we removed old books from the catalog, presumably so we could make evil old lady magic by firelight.

“Excuse you. The books I got rid of were not the seminal works of literature you appear to think they were. I don't think it is responsible to retain a copy of _Asbestos: the Miracle Mineral_.”

“This is a modern-day Library of Alexandria situation,” Gigi said, just as he said every other time I finished a weeding project.

“Except now we have e-books and weirdos who retype entire books entire books and post them onto their little OCD blogs.”

We had to transfer trains to go uptown.

“Just think about the value those books would have had for future generations?”

“Just think about the current college students who might use the medical advice in those books and kill themselves. One of the books that I decided to put in a closed collection was about maximizing your week, by giving you eight days in a work week, by shifting your sleep patterns significantly throughout any given period of time. That stuff's dangerous for idiots who are trying to give themselves an edge,” I replied. Gigi wasn't the one who had seen multiple nervous breakdowns in the library during finals week. Before I was promoted to having my own office, cossetted away from most of society, just as I liked it, I had the midnight shift in reference services, where I had seen quite a few students lose it, as they realized there was no way that they could fit all of the knowledge that ever existed into their normal, human brains. It wasn't cute.

I never got the whole stress thing that caused half of the student population of Columbia to go prematurely bald, but I went to CW Post for my second Master's degree, so what did I know?

I got to my office the same as usual, even if I still felt a little sick. I shut my office door and took a quick catnap under the desk. Everyone knew not to disturb me for the first hour of work, when I usually answered my e-mails and trolled Reddit for a little bit before actually getting productive. I woke up rather refreshed. At least my hair didn't hurt. No one had come in and my computer screen faced away from the door, so I felt fine checking Reddit, to see what I had done the night before, drunk off of complimentary wine from my parents' vineyard.

Half of the time my posts were incoherent thoughts on RuPaul's Drag Race and how All Stars was a disgrace. The other half, I fancied myself a real scholar, having done my first Master's on Classical Civilizations, specializing in Roman historiography of the Empire. Or that's what I would have specialized in, had I decided to go all in for the Ph.D. I had specialized just in Roman history, for my MA. It was part of the reason Gigi and I got along so famously. Sometimes I would sneak some of the rarer books out of the collection to read at home and translate the Latin myself, for a personal treat.

Last night, I had apparently regarded myself as an unsung genius for the ages, as I posted on one of the subreddits about the last book I had absconded with, with every intention of returning, I must add.  _The Chalice of St. Peter and Other Tales_ is was a weird fairy tale book that wasn't something I usually would have picked, since it was originally published in the Middle Ages and was just printed in Latin, for kicks, probably for scholars.

Some other users were very interested in the book and were asking for photos, which evidently I provided, by linking to my Facebook. I rubbed my face, in disgust with my stupidity and deleted all of my comments and and toyed with the idea of deactivating my Facebook page. I was worried about losing all of my contacts, since I enjoyed the events feature of Facebook, for my parties. Instead, I cracked down on my privacy settings and moved on with my day.

For lunch, I went to a Chinese place with a few of the other librarians. Usually, I'd call one of my friends, who lived nearby, but instead, I decided against that, since he was really annoying last time I talked to him. I did miss the dear old head librarian, Rino Gattuso, who used to love stabbing us with forks, but he had moved onto another university, in another state.

After work, I went home alone, since Gigi had to stay late for a lecture. I was going to take a long look at  _The Chalice of St. Peter_ with a nice big glass of wine and maybe I'd order in a pizza. Or, probably, I contemplated what I should do: go for a jog.

When I got back to my apartment, I noticed that the door was ajar slightly. Which was certainly not how I left it. I didn't live with anyone, so it wasn't like I could just have someone who stopped by and forgot. My parents had a key, but they rarely came by my apartment. And they would have called me. I tapped on the door, with my foot, so the door would open slightly. I poked my head in, to see if anyone was still around and to see if my apartment was trashed or anything. It didn't look like anything was disturbed. I went in and took a look around. Everything seemed to be in order. My computer was still in the main room, I still had my TV. Everything looked weirdly in its place, just how I liked it and just how I left it. I decided to forgo the wine, the jog, and  _The Chalice of St. Peter_ to go to the hardware store to buy a big ass deadbolt to put on the inside of my apartment door, security deposit be damned. I, sure as fuck, was not going to murdered in my own, depressing, divorced man apartment.

 


	2. Chapter 2

I decided that the burglars, were they to return, could take whatever they wanted, but leave me out of it. I had the same philosophy with muggers. My parents had always drilled it into us that stuff could be replaced, but people couldn't be. I guess I had somewhat internalized that belief, even though you would never get me to admit that to my parents.

That's why I bought my newest deadbolt. The burglars weren't going to get inside, while I was inside. I ate breakfast, staring at the front door, next to which I put an old souvenir baseball bat from a Mets' game, back when they still played at Shea Stadium. It was probably mostly hollow and was only there for intimidation purposes, rather than actual safety reasons. I tried to call my landlord, but his voicemail was too full, so I couldn't even leave him a message. I couldn't really call the police, since there was nothing stolen, so they'd probably just tell me that I didn't shut my door all the way, which I guess they would be justified in saying. They didn't know me; they wouldn't know if I was a flake or not. I wasn't, but it wasn't worth the extra stress.

I was mostly just glad that the burglars hadn't taken my karaoke machine. It was the only thing I got in the divorce. Mostly because it was the only thing I asked for and insisted was mine. I let him take the rest of our stuff, including our friends and all that shit. He gave it to me as a birthday present like fifteen years ago, before we got married. After that, I mostly just had work, my karaoke machine, and stolen manuscripts from the Columbia University Library.

At work, I had a new crush. Kind of. If thirty-five year old men can have crushes. I'm sure they can, but they have a more mature term for it. Paramour? No. That makes it sound more serious than it is. Fernando Llorente was merely a hot piece of ass who I admired from afar. That was certainly the most appropriate term for him. He was one of the cataloguers, who had to share his office with Carlos Tevez, who was so far opposite of sexy, he was almost sexy again, but he had fallen short of that wraparound.

Sometimes, I would make a point of going to the cataloguing office to visit, mostly in the guise of actual work, but with no real desire to conduct real business. I just enjoyed pretending to drop folders and books for Fernando Llorente to pick up for me. He always smiled at me when he handed me back my belongings, like he knew exactly what I was doing. He was tall and blonde and had been rumored to be in an off-Broadway play where he played a lion and appeared completely nude, while wearing a mane. I couldn't go by myself, since I felt like a trenchcoat pervert, and my attempts to convince Gigi to go with me were futile.

As I grabbed a manilla folder, kept shut by a giant rubber band, to head to the cataloguing office, I remembered that I still had the _Chalice of St. Peter_ and made a mental note to bring it back before anyone noticed it was missing. I needed Fernando Llorente's ass to make me feel a little better.

“Hey Andrea,” Fernando Llorente smiled at me, as I walked in.

“Hi Andy!” Carlos Tevez greeted me in return, but barely looked up. I had never been called Andy before in my life, so it took me back a little.

“I didn't know you were called Andy,” Fernando remarked, giving me a half-smile. I almost jumped him right in the cataloguing office. I was very hot under the collar and had to excuse myself, since I was sweating profusely.

I shuffled through my papers, like I actually said something to do, but eventually I had to leave, since I was only there to spy on Fernando Llorente, which in the grand scheme of reasons to be anywhere was kind of weak.

Later in the day, I was playing RuPaul's Drag Race-themed 2048 on my iPhone, when there was a knock on my office door. I dropped my phone and kicked my feet off the top of the desk, shuffling papers around as though I had actually been working.

Fernando came in and sat down at the chair in front of my desk, like he belonged there or had done it a million times. He said, “Am I interrupting something?”

“King of. I was in the middle of reviewing the selections for this month,” I replied, since I couldn't tell if he was there for actual reasons or not, “Is there anything I can help you with?”

Fernando leaned towards my phone and smirked, “It looks like those ladies have something else to say about your productivity.”

“You don't know who they are?”

“No. Should I?”

“Uh, duh. They're the queens from _RuPaul's Drag Race_ season six. You need to rectify this right away. When you get home, find Logo on your cable listings and they rerun it about seven times a day, in between reruns of _Designing Women_ and _Who's the Boss.”_

“No can do,” Fernando said, “I don't have a television.”

But how did he occupy his meaningless existence on this planet? Was he trying to say that he read or actually talked to other human beings when he wasn't at work? Other than at parties, the only person I actually sought out was Gigi and that was because he got handsy when he was drunk.

“You're in luck. I have Netflix. We can watch all seven seasons. You're not busy tonight, right?” I asked. I spent a significant amount of my life, devoid of emotional connection, other than _RuPaul's Drag Race_ , so I felt a great need to spread its gospel.

“So it's a date then?”

“What's a date?”

“This whole television show thing?” Fernando asked.

I hadn't even realized that I invited Fernando Llorente, library lust object, to my apartment to watch television. I had been so off my game I didn't even make any of that sound remotely sexy. Well, I guess the potential of sitting close to each other on the couch held something, but Fernando probably didn't know whether I lived alone. For all he knew, I still lived with my parents in a studio apartment, with our beds all separated by sheets. If that had been the case, I would have committed suicide a long time ago.

“Were you here for something important?” I asked.

“I am now.”

At five o'clock, Fernando met me in the lobby and we went to catch the train to my building, running into Gigi, who was juggling a number of manilla folders. He glanced up and down Fernando, narrowing his eyes a little bit.

“Gigi, do you know Fernando?” I asked, trying to introduce them properly. Gigi shrugged, finding the rare empty seat away from us, to flick through his manilla folders.

When we got to my apartment, I found a bottle of wine in my closet. I only had one more box of four bottles under my bed, which meant that I had to take the hike out to Long Island to get more soon. I also contemplated locking the big ass deadbolt that I had fastened to my apartment door; I did want to make sure that our marathon wasn't interrupted by very clean burglars, but I also didn't want Fernando to think I was locking him _with me_ , so I could kill him without Fernando being able to escape.

“Everyone else at work's been here,” Fernando said, taking a seat on the sofa, across from my television, “I've never been invited to any of your parties.”

“I'll have to friend you on Facebook,” I informed him, sitting down next to him.

“I don't have Facebook.”

Jesus Christ. Who did he think he was? Amish? I'd have said he was only slightly more technologically advanced than my grandmother, but even she had a cable package, so she could watch HGTV for twenty-three hours a day.

“Why not? Don't you have friends?”

“Yeah. They call me. With the telephone.”

“Okay, grandpa.”

“You're older than me,” Fernando said, leaning closer to me, but pulling away when I almost summoned up the courage to stick my tongue in his mouth. Two bottles of wine and one season of _RuPaul's Drag Race_ later, we were kind of sloppy. Me less so than Fernando, since I made a healthy habit of drinking plenty of wine, so the effects were dulled. He leaned in very close to my face; I could feel his warm wine breath.

“Your face looks weird when you smile,” Fernando said, in a drunk stage whisper, “Not that you shouldn't smile or anything. You just have one of those faces.”

“Thanks?”

“No, really. It's a good face. I like it.”

“Good. I wasn't really planning on changing it.”

I texted Gigi to see if he wanted to do karaoke with Fernando and me, but he didn't respond. I woke up at seven AM on my living room floor in my socks and my undershirt, no underpants. It was one of the latest instances in a long series of similar instances.

 


	3. Chapter 3

It wasn't for another month that I remembered that I hadn't seen that dumb book that I technically stole (with all intentions of returning). Since it was summertime, my hours got halved and I spent most of my time going to the beach with Fernando. I tried to convince Gigi to hang out with us when we went to go watch the World Cup, but he refused. I always reached out to Gigi, but he was always telling me that he had some theory he needed to research, but he was always in his apartment. He didn't go to Butler or even, God forbid, Bobst, the NYU library. I told him to get Columbia to pay him to go to Greece for research, but he declined for whatever reason. I wrote a successful proposal to go to Madeira for a conference, where I mostly just put wine on the University's tab, while I talked, or more likely yelled drunkenly, about database accessibility on a pool deck.

One day, I had to interrupt this emotional bliss to go to work, where I found a notice plastered all over the acquisitions department bulletin board.

“RARE BOOK: THE CHALICE OF ST. PETER. CRIMINAL PROSECUTION WILL BE PURSUED, IF BOOK IS NOT RETURNED.”

Well fuck. I told the secretaries that I had some out of the building business to attend to, that some vendor was having a crazy meeting where I had to go to right away, lest they sell all of our journal subscriptions and books to NYU. Instead, once I got to an appropriate distance away from the library building and the campus as a whole, I called Gigi, who answered his phone with a charming, “I'm busy.”

“Can you go into my apartment and look for something for me?”

“Why don't you ask Fernando?” his tone got even snippier.

“Fernando? He doesn't even live near us. You live up a floor,” I replied.

He hung up on me. At the time, I didn't know what crawled into his panties. Looking back, it is very easy to see what had gotten him all bugged, but for the sake of narrative convenience, I'll wait to disclose that information. I called him again. He picked up, “What?”

“Can you check? There's a book I stole from the archives and I'm risking criminal prosecution.”

“Call Carlo. He'll get you out of any jailtime,” Gigi replied.

“Are you kidding? Carlo wants me in jail!” I shouted before Gigi hung the phone up again. Perhaps I was being a little over-the-top in my response, but I couldn't really help it, considering my conundrum. I couldn't help but feel that the library's response was an over-the-top response to a fairly victimless crime. I guess “history” could be considered a victim, but seeing as “history” is an abstract concept, it's a little hard to believe that “history” put up the notices or that “history” wanted me to get fired or arrested.

Since I was allegedly in a meeting, I decided to fuck off for the rest of the day to find that book. Fernando stopped by after he was done at work and arrived to find my entire apartment upside down. On the plus side, I did find a lot of receipts that would probably be helpful for my taxes, but I couldn't find that book. I did find my marriage license, which I debated about keeping. I wondered if you were supposed to keep that forever or shred it.

“What are you looking for?” Fernando shouted from the living room, while I returned to my bedroom to search under my bed.

“An overdue library book,” I replied, technically not lying. I wasn't sure if my newest fuck buddy was read for the responsibility of keeping me out of jail. I knew that on a good day, I could trust Gigi, but other than potentially family members, there weren't many in my life who would go out of their way.

“From Butler?”

“No. Queens Library. Those guys are real fuckers about fines.”

“Just pay for the replacement copy.”

I checked what the going rate for a copy of _The Chalice of St. Peter_ was, on eBay, on my way back to my apartment and it wasn't something that I could afford. Were I a quirky billionaire, maybe.

“Then don't go back. You can use my address to get a card at BPL.”

As much as I would love to stop working all together, I knew that it was tough out there for a guy with two Master's degrees and no real world skills. I could write you a beautiful essay on the politics of historiography and I could give an hour long lecture on materials selection, but a real life job outside of academia? Nope. I also assumed that being a thirty-five year old hooker didn't earn a living wage. At the very least, I wouldn't be able to afford my apartment. I wondered if Gigi stopped being weird, if he would let me live with him.

Fernando said the most innocuous, but frightening thing I'd ever heard in my life, “My mom and dad are having a barbeque for the Fourth of July. You should come.”

And I almost had a heart attack, while under my own bed. I had been planning to watch  _Independence Day_ and  _Rocky IV_ before making the long trek out to see my own family members and set off illegal fireworks that a cousin smuggled in from Pennsylvania, from a “Last Chance Before Jersey! Firework Blowout!” stand. Then, I'd probably bet my brother on which drunk uncle would lose his finger in the resultant chaos. It was a tradition that I enjoyed.

I pretended not to hear him and asked him, “Can you see if there's a book out there? It's really old.”

“My mom and dad invited you to come to their Fourth of July barbeque,” he repeated, coming into my bedroom.

“I haven't seen my own parents in a while and I promised them I'd go out to their place,” I said. I had actually seen my parents the weekend before and we got dinner with my brother and his family. I hadn't told Fernando, since I knew he'd want to meet them. Instead, I told him that Gigi and I were going to a workshop for old manuscript preservation; he knew that Gigi didn't really like him, so he, in turn, told me that he was going to hang out with his friend, Javi Martínez, who was a young, perpetually confused neighbor, to make me jealous probably.

“I could go with you,” Fernando offered.

“We're very patriotic,” I insisted, crawling out from underneath my bed, “Usually, we sit in a circle and tell each other what we're thankful for and how America made it all happen.”

“That's fine,” Fernando said, sitting down next to me, getting very close, “I have a lot of things to thank America for.”

“And then, we usually pray for a good hour,” I said, “As Italians, it is our nature.”

“It's in your nature to pray for...America for an hour?”

“We're very worried about the economy right now.”

He shrugged and accepted it. Fernando seemed smart enough to realize that I was emotionally constipated and did not want him to meet my parents, due to the emotional implications of such a meeting; he seemed smart enough to not believe that I was someone who prayed for more than fifteen minutes, maybe, at a Church, if I was lucky.

“You guys are much different than other Italian families, huh? My neighbors just wore tank tops and smuggled in fireworks and set their trees on fire accidentally,” Fernando said. It was pretty much like he knew my family anyway.

 


End file.
